Making Commits via the GitHub API

For fun I’ve been learning a bit about the GitHub API. Using the API it’s possible to do just about everything you can do on GitHub itself, from commenting on PRs to adding commits to a repo. Here I’m going to show how to do add commits to a repo on GitHub. A notebook demonstrating things with code is available here, but you may want to read this post first for the high level view.

Choosing a Client Library

The GitHub API is an HTTP interface so you can talk to it via any tool that speaks HTTP, including things like curl. To make programming with the API simpler there are a number of libraries that allow communicate with GitHub via means native to whatever language you’re using. I’m using Python and I went with the github3.py library based on its Python 3 compatibility, active development, and good documentation.

Making Commits

Modifying a Single File

The special case of making a commit affecting a single file is much simpler than affecting multiple files. Creating, updating, and deleting a file can be done via a single API call once you have enough information to specify what you want done.

Modifying Multiple Files

Making a commit affecting multiple files requires making multiple API calls and some understanding of Git’s internal data store. That’s because to change multiple files you have to add all the changes to the repo one at a time before making a commit. The process is outlined in full in the API docs about Git data.

I should note that I think deleting multiple files in a single commit requires a slightly different procedure, one I’ll cover in another post.